Chapter 02
Caitlyn Riagán knew something was wrong as soon as she saw the captain running and speaking into his earpiece. He ran right in front of her to the flight deck. Her powers were limited as she was drugged and shackled onto the chair, but she had enough energy to feel his and the first officer's panic as they closed the deck door. She heard muffled voices and raised muffled voices.
Cait was brought to the GenTech Research Foundation after being tested from the city of Galway. Galway, once known as one of the richest cities in Ireland, had fallen on hard times after the third world war, and people were extremely poor. Cait's family rarely had two meals a day.
The GenTech program sought children with a high IQ for their "Special" program and was willing to pay the families who gave up their children generously. Caitlyn's dad, finding out about the program, sold his daughter to the foundation without even her mother knowing. As a stranger clutched her, a screaming Cait called out to her father, "Athair! Athair! Please don't leave me." He just walked away, not even turning back.
A tear rolled down her cheek as she remembered. It was 16 years ago, and she was only 6 years old. Caitlyn wondered all her life how he could do that to her, how he could be a monster like that. She trusted him with her life, and he had always kept her safe, or so she thought, until that day. That day she cried and cried until her voice was hoarse in that room, feeling all alone, even with all the other children. Most were scared silent, some like her were wailing for their parents.
The other thought she had was that as soon as her mother found out Cait was missing, she would come looking for her. The children were in that room, at the cold warehouse for 6 days. Mother never came, she never even got to say goodbye to her.
It had been a long time since the Spiorad-Briseadh thought about her parents. She always thought they loved her until that day when her father gave her up without even a kiss goodbye.
Even though once in a while, like that moment, she felt sad, it was soon replaced by anger. It was all their fault, everything that happened to me is all their fault. I hate them, I will never forgive them.
Riagán was what she was called going forward. No one used her given name. To her "teachers" and other special children alike, she was just Riagán.
She was poked and prodded, experimented on and tortured until she became their greatest weapon. The GenTech Research Foundation made her strong, physically and mentally. They pumped her full of drugs, genetically enhancing her brain, and making her able to move objects, move people, read people, and destroy people.
She was one of the few, from the thousands tested, who survived. She and her fellow "gifted" were coming back from a demonstration done for the bigwigs in the UEC who came in secret to the moon base of GenTech to see them in action.
Cait didn't know how well the pitch went, but she was tired of looking at the same bland white wall day after day in her room. Scientists asked her to do menial things just to see whether she still had her power.
The scientists still didn't know the full extent of her power, but she knew. After her last treatment about 5 years back, she felt as if she was getting stronger and stronger. Riagán tried to hide it, but she started slipping up with her powers.
Once when she was asked to move a jug atop a cupboard full of glasses that were securely fixed to a wall by sturdy metal brackets, Cait threw the whole cupboard from one end of the room to the other, smashing everything in it.
Her handler knew she was annoyed and that she had been asking for larger challenges for weeks, but they fell on deaf ears. However, after the cupboard incident, they started giving her bigger opportunities to move larger things.
The downside was that, however loyal she was to the foundation, they only thought of her as an experiment, not a person. With greater power, they kept her sedated if she was not asked to perform any tests. She was only fully aware of her powers inside the safe room where they conducted the tests.
She remembered the first time she was brought to their training facility in New Zealand. It was the only place in the world with unpolluted nature, including green meadows, forests, volcanoes, and snow-capped mountains. Other places around the world were destroyed either in the previous world war or in the fight with the unknown alien force.
For example, Stonehenge and the surrounding green areas now lay as a rocky ground where nothing ever grew, thanks to a bomber carrying chemical weapons that crashed after the British shot it down.
Cait never saw the outside of the facility; they were always in the compound, and the general populous was allowed to roam around in a makeshift indoor yard. Guards were posted every 10 meters as well. The yard was large, like a soccer field.
When Riagán was first brought to the compound in New Zealand, all she thought was that it was a nightmare she had to wake up from. She thought her mother would be holding her and asking her to get up and help with selling some bread or cakes to help them get through the day, but she never woke up. Her mother wasn't there.
Night after night, she would curl up in her dark room with one light. The guards switched off the lights in all the cells by 9 PM for everyone to sleep. For days, Cait would curl up at night and cry. But as days turned into weeks, her parents never came for her. She realized one night, when she was sick of crying, that they were not going to save her.
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She was left alone every day to roam the yard and given three meals. After about a year of her arrival, they started the tests.
So they started having the kids do little things with their abilities. Cait's abilities developed pretty fast, faster than the others. Two weeks after her augmentation doses (which was what the staff called the meds), she started moving pens, pencils, crayons, etc. at a fast pace. And she could move them across the room from one table on the left to a table on the right with ease.
The power didn't grow, nor did it decrease as time went on. There were kids who used to come and go during the 15 years she was there, but only a few rarely stayed. Later she found out that the failed experiments were disposed of; they didn't return home to their families.
So after 10 years, the incident with the cupboard happened. Within 6 months, she had developed a new power, the power of the Spiorad-Briseadh.
She was taken off her meds for the tests, so they could see how she performed at her full capacity. Unfortunately, without knowing the full extent of her power, she felt herself released into Doctor Richard Glass, the scientist experimenting on her that day. He screamed and wailed as she concentrated on lifting a 1000kg crate.
Barely 16, she couldn't fathom what was happening. Doctor Glass went insane in front of her eyes, and he never recovered.
The new doctor, Anthony Grey, was not as gentle as Doctor Glass. He wanted results, or Cait would be punished. He and his team pushed Cait day and night to get results. Every time she got to her room, she just fell asleep exhausted.
At the age of 18, Cait and three other boys, Riley, Clem, and Jacob, were sent on a mission to stop a smuggling ring. The ring was trying to smuggle weapons that were not up to standard and wanted to be fitted onto the new deep space mission ships.
Cait and the boys were sent in to stop the threat quietly and efficiently. All four of them were trained in combat fighting because it was required learning at GenTech. They managed to get their merchandise back by stealthily killing most of the guards. However, one guard saw Jacob and killed him.
When Cait, Riley, and Clem returned, they had everything they went in to get, except Jacob. They had brought on each of the prototype energy weapons and destroyed the facility using good old C4.
However successful their mission was, Doctor Grey was furious. Jacob was a stable experiment, just like Riley, Clem, and Cait. Grey roared at Cait, telling her she was careless and was going to spend 30 minutes in the electric chamber. That’s how they were 'controlled'. Glass rarely sent them there, but Grey almost always did.
That day, strapped into the chair as the electricity flowed through her body, Caitlyn Riagán felt different. She didn’t feel pain. Every time she had felt it, bursts of flashing pain ran through her body. But today, she just felt a tingling sensation. This day was different. Suddenly, she knew she could control the current flowing through her body. She didn’t know how, but she just knew it. She killed the three attendants who were with her.
Caitlyn used her hands as a conduit, sending the electricity through one man, which then went through the other one and finally through the third. She controlled the electricity, somehow making her mind control it.
The electricity was stopped, and as before, she was heavily drugged so she couldn’t concentrate. She was then taken back to her cold room.
The next morning, the drugs kept coming, and from that day forward, she was never let out of the room except for her tests.
In the next few months, more of her powers manifested. Along with her telekinesis and control of electricity, she also gained telepathy and mind control abilities.
Mind control was weak at first but strengthened over time. Within three months, she could control two people's minds while also moving things. However, this meant more and more isolation for her. Very soon, she was moved to a room without any windows and with only one dim light, which was switched off at 8pm and turned on at 6am.
Now seated alone in her room, she was brought back to the present as the ship began to shake uncontrollably. Cait looked out the window again and saw a purplish glow out in space, all around the ship.
For the first time in years, she remembered her parents, Mam and Athair. She remembered how she curled up in the middle of their small bed, with both parents kissing her cheeks tightly from either side, feeling the wiggle of Mam’s long nose and Athair’s face hairs tickling her smooth cheek skin. Both of them saying at once, "You are our little princess. We will always, always love you and be there for you."
But they were not coming for her. They never did and never will. And now she was all alone, she thought as the transport ship Eden jerked violently.
She trusted no one after her parents, felt nothing for anyone, just let her feelings numb, did as she was told, but felt like she was punished every time she did something GenTech wanted. No one cared about her, so she didn’t care about anyone.
The Eden went into a spin, suddenly the G-force traction equalizers went offline, and she could feel the G-forces hitting her with full force. For the first time in a long time, she finally felt something, fear.
The Spiorad-Briseadh opened her mouth and screamed as she slipped into darkness.